Cleaning out the draft box, I just realized I never posted this music video, a welcome break from a long couple weeks. Setup: David Brooks had an editorial a while ago about how twitter and facebook and everything else internets were ruining dating and the young people. I agree in the sense that my gut reaction is that ‘the kids these days’ are in fact terrible. So much ofmyfavorite music, even when I was a kid, was about how terrible the kids are.

Ms. Rortybomb (abbreviated K.) is currently in Morocco for a year of field work studying Moroccan hip-hop, and the way Moroccans use hip-hop as a way of navigating identities, globalization and neoliberalization, and I read his editorial right around the time K sent me a music video for H-Kayne’s “Jil Jdid”, which is a tongue-in-cheek track about how the kids of Morocco waste all kinds of time messing around on facebook and going on internet dates. H-Kayne is a new and very popular hip-hop group out of Morocco; you can see their myspace page here.

The video is the story of a kid who goes on a 17 hour internet bender and needs to go to the hospital where doctors, played by the rappers, have to hook him up to iphones and playstation controllers in order to get his body going again. The rest of the video involves middle-class Moroccan teens going on facebook, meeting up for internet dates, playing video games, having that odd expression of staring into a computer monitor, etc. (in the middle of all the Moroccan Arabic you can hear the words “myspace” and “skype”). It’s pretty amazing:

I imagine Brooks is one of those who think hip hop corrupts everything, but I certainly like the idea of a team up between him and this hip-hop group; if there must be one, there is no End of History theory more comforting to me that the nations of the globe teaming up to complain about how the kids are wasting their time jerking around with crap on the internet. That is post-ideological.